Future Vision

Ever since the mid-1970s, summer has meant movie blockbusters as Hollywood attempts to cash in on school vacations and people looking for free air conditioning and expensive popcorn.

The movies in summer are bigger and bolder and louder.

That has never been truer than it will be in the coming weeks, as Hollywood reaches back to decades-old tricks to fight off modern technological challenges.

As "Journey to the Center of the Earth" makes its way in all three dimensions into theaters today and the buzz continues to build about the IMAX version of "The Dark Knight," moviegoers are poised on the precipice of a new era.

Maybe.

The trend is a predictable Hollywood reaction to threats of piracy, the increasing presence of tiny picture screens on iPhones and the movie-quality picture and sound of home theaters. The idea is to make movies that cry out to be seen in their full glory on huge screens with effects that can't be replicated in the living room or on a wristwatch. Thus, more than a dozen 3-D movies are in development.

This is not new. The concept of fighting off challenges by making things bigger has been around since the 1950s, when 3-D movies and CinemaScope were introduced to do battle with television, which was slowly eating away at movie attendance.

The '50s 3-D movement is remembered as the era of "Cat-Women of the Moon" and "Creature From the Black Lagoon" but there were attempts at more serious fare.

Most notably, Alfred Hitchcock shot "Dial M for Murder" in 3-D, although few ever got to see it in that format. The 3-D craze fizzled at about the same time people discovered that 2-D was more than enough for Karl Malden in "Phantom of the Rue Morgue."

The technology remained dormant until a revival in the 1980s (as Hollywood had a temporary fear of VCRs), when the trick was to release the third picture in any franchise in 3-D. Viewers were treated to a shark swimming right over their heads in the otherwise deplorable "Jaws 3-D" and various forms of mayhem in "Amityville 3-D."

The gimmick didn't last long.

Part of the problem was those goofy cardboard glasses with the tinfoil lenses.

Moviegoers felt comfortable wearing them for about as long as it took Life magazine to snap an iconic photograph of an audience at a 3-D movie.

And they wouldn't work well if you turned your head slightly to the left or the right.

The new 3-D technology used in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," called Real D Cinema, banishes the tinfoil in favor of glasses that look like something the people of the '60s thought people in the '80s might wear.

The main difference for theaters is that old 3-D movies required two projectors and used a color filtering system to make the eyes combine two images into one.

Real D Cinema requires one projector that projects two images through a special screen placed in front of the lens. The special glasses again help the eye fuse the pictures into one three-dimensional image.

For the viewer the difference is in the seamless nature of the picture quality and in the absence of distortion when the head is tilted during viewing.

Real D is one of several technologies competing to sign up studios and theater chains. All are vastly superior to the old red-and-green system,.

The question is whether 3-D is the next frontier in filmmaking or yet another short-lived gimmick.

The box office for movies such as "The Polar Express" - which did almost 30 percent of its business in 3-D despite showing on a far lower percentage of screens - suggests the third attempt for 3-D may have legs.

The trap is that these movies might again become excuses to hurl things at the audience.

"What 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' emphasizes is how technology ends up dictating content," writes John Anderson in Variety. "Helmer Brevig seems compelled to remind us, now and again, that we're in 3-D, so something flies at our faces for no apparent reason except to justify the ad budget."

The verdict may not be in on the new 3-D, but those who have seen the IMAX version of "The Dark Knight" argue that it may be the biggest thing to hit Hollywood since sound.

"I have never normally enjoyed watching movies converted to IMAX, but the work in this was breathtaking, a true look at a future where movies constantly push visuals to these extremes," says Alex Billington on FirstShowing.net. "It will instantly become the standard for the future, similar to bullet time from 'The Matrix.' "

As the Joker might say, here we go.

Note: "Journey to the Center of the Earth" has been released in both 3-D and 2-D versions, so check movie listings carefully before attending.